Israel. Iran and The New Neocons

From the American News Project:

Washington's neocons are alive and well, advising both John McCain and President Bush. Now many are saying Bush should permit Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities after Election Day before the new president takes office. ANP investigates as we chase down John Bolton, Bill Kristol and Frank Gaffney to see how far ahead these hawks are thinking. And a new report says the whole plan could backfire.

Watch the video:

The Way of The World - By Ron Suskind

From Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist and bestselling author Ron Suskind comes a startling look at how America lost its way and at the nation's struggle, day by day, to reclaim the moral authority upon which its survival depends. From the White House to Downing Street, from the fault–line countries of South Asia to the sands of Guantánamo, Suskind offers an astonishing story that connects world leaders to the forces waging today's shadow wars and to the next generation of global citizens. Tracking down truth and hope within the Beltway and far beyond it, Suskind delivers historic disclosures with this emotionally stirring and strikingly original portrait of the post-9/11 world.

In a sweeping, propulsive, and multilayered narrative, The Way of the World investigates how America relinquished the moral leadership it now desperately needs to fight the real threat of our era: a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists. Truth, justice, and accountability become more than mere words in this story. Suskind shows where the most neglected dangers lie in the story of "The Armageddon Test"—a desperate gamble to send undercover teams into the world's nuclear black market to frustrate the efforts of terrorists trying to procure weapons–grade uranium. In the end, he finally reveals for the first time the explosive falsehood underlying the Iraq War and the entire Bush presidency.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official "that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion."

Forgery or no, the letter did exist and was reported by several media outlets, including The (London) Sunday Telegraph and Fox News, Politico reports. The White House has called the allegation of forgery "absurd."

Ron Suskind is an American journalist and writer. A former Wall Street Journal reporter (1993-2000), he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1995. On January 13, 2004, his book on former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill and the Bush administration, The Price of Loyalty, was published, revealing details about the early years of the Bush administration. Among the many claims in the book, which drew from numerous sources and more than 19,000 internal government documents, was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupation of Iraq was planned from Bush's first U.S. National Security Council meeting in January 2001. Administration officials have contended that O'Neill confused contingency plans with actual plans for invasion.

Watch the clip, Keith Olbermann Interviews Ron Suskind on "The Way of the World"

Read further.

The Forged Iraqi Letter: What Just Happened?
"The President Knows more than He Lets on"
Ron Suskind: White House ordered forgery to link al-Qaeda/Saddam to 9/11 attacks

The Zionist Genocide Promoter, Benny Morris

Racism and Genocide: Lies of Our Times

by Prof. James Petras.
Professor Petras is the author of Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Clarity Press 2008) and The Power of Israel in the US (Clarity Press 2006).

One of the hallmarks of totalitarian ideologues is the use of the big lie: a virulent attack on a defenseless group and then a categorical denial turning victims into executioners and executioners into victims.

Zionist genocide promoter, Benny Morris practices the Big Lie. He claims, "I have never supported the brutal expulsion of all Palestinians…I have said, repeatedly, that the expulsion of the Palestinians is immoral and impracticable."

In a recent interview in Israel, Morris states, "Under some circumstances, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 (of nearly a million Palestinians) were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands. Moreover, if he (Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion) was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleaned the whole country – the whole land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations." In its extremism, Morris’ promotion of Judeo-fascist ethnocide of Palestine/Jordan exceeds that of any expressed by a secular public Jewish figure in Israel.

Uprooting, massacring and driving 3 million Palestinians from their homes, land and communities, according to Morris, lessens suffering – for Jews – and promises a quieter life for Israeli Jews! This is the same rationale that Hitler pronounced in his project to ‘purify’ Nazi Germany.

Morris fabricates a tale about Israel’s peaceful role in the Middle East when in fact it has been the most aggressive, militarist, expansionist state in the entire Middle East. He writes, "I am completely unaware that Zionism ever aimed to ‘rule the Middle East’…Zionism simply wanted to establish and maintain a (miniscule) Jewish state in the Land of Israel/Palestine, the patrimony of the Jews…conquered by savage Muslim Arab invaders."

The history of the Israeli state tells us otherwise. Israel has expanded and colonized over three quarters of Palestine since the original partition in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and seized and occupies territory from three of the four countries. Israel is the only country in the Middle East, which has repeatedly invaded Lebanon, destroyed its infrastructure, slaughtered Palestinian refugees in camps and attempted to establish a puppet regime in South Lebanon. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country, which shot down a Libyan commercial airliner carrying pilgrims to Mecca killing all aboard.

Israel’s ‘lobby’ – the Zionist power configuration in the US – has secured over $120 billion dollars of US military aid and the most advanced military technology for Israel, to insure Israel’s ‘overwhelming military superiority’ in the region. The military superiority of Israel has served the Jewish state to threaten, pressure, destabilize and influence Arab states.

The biggest nuclear threat in the Middle East and the sole nuclear power (over 200 nuclear bombs) and the only country, which publicly threatens to attack with nuclear weapons – is Israel. Israel has engaged in cross border terrorist assassinations throughout the Middle East, training death squads in Northern Iraq (Kurdistan) to Colombia and recognizes no sovereign borders in pursuit of its hegemonic goals.

Morris’ style is as revelatory as the substance of his totalitarian beliefs. He claims, "Israel has been threatened by Iran with destruction and the Iranian nuclear project appears to have Israel as its target." Apart from a vague remark, which was grossly mistranslated, of Iranian President Ahmadinejad about Israel "Disappearing from the page of history" (a remark pointing to a political change of the ethnic nature of the state), the Iranian government has never threatened to nuke Israel. Morris, the prophet of Armageddon, with special powers to delve into the "self-sacrificing mindset of the mullahs who run Iran," knows that deterrence will not work. No evidence founded on action is presented. No history of Iranian foreign policy over the past 50 years is presented.

The key to understanding Benny Morris’ proposal for nuclear genocide is his totalitarian-racist view of Arabs, Muslims and Iranians. In an interview in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (2004) regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations he asserted, "Something like a cage has to be built for them…There is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another." According to Morris, Palestinians are "barbarians who want to take our lives…At the moment that society is in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers." To Morris, the dispossessed Palestinians are the killers while the Israeli colonial state, which dispossessed millions, tortured tens of thousands, jailed hundreds of thousands and killed thousands and is building a huge ghetto wall destroying the livelihood of 3 million, is a sane, healthy society. Dehumanizing the victims and the use of sub-human analogies is common practice of totalitarian ideologues. Considering Muslims as sub-human eases the way to incinerating them with nuclear weapons.

Benny Morris bases his argument for launching a nuclear attack against Iran on two boldface lies: (1) "Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared to making weapons, not to the peaceful application of nuclear power"; and (2) "Everyone knows that such measures (economic sanctions) have so far led nowhere and are unlikely to be applied." The sixteen leading US intelligence agencies released a National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 based on all available high tech sources and inside informants, stating that Iran was not preparing enriched uranium for weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has permanent on site inspectors and makes continuous visits to Iranian nuclear facilities over the past decade, has not found any evidence of a weapons program. Every country, except Israel and the Zionist-dominated US Congress and White House believe that negotiations should continue. China, Russia, the states of the Middle East have supported sanctions among other countries. Iran’s uranium enrichment program is legal and is practiced by dozens of countries around the world. Only Israel, the US and the EU have arbitrarily decided to exclude Iran from developing nuclear enrichment programs for peaceful uses. Morris and the Israelis equate Iran’s legitimate activity with nuclear weapon production and extrapolate the latter to an immediate threat against Israel’s very existence.

Morris’ most laughable assertion is his claim that he "never advocated a genocidal attack on Iran with the aim of killing 70 million Iranians." In his own words, just a few weeks earlier in a July 18 editorial in the New York Times he wrote,

"Iran’s leaders would do well to re-think their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Barring this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland."

By posing the question to Iran as one of ‘no choice’ but surrendering national sovereignty to an "Israeli nuclear threat’ Morris has pre-determined the result: Israel will have to engage in a genocidal nuclear assault on Iran. Morris’ double talk and utter confusion in claiming to oppose Iranian genocide while supporting ‘limited’ nuclear strikes against Iran reveals his total ignorance of the most elementary consequences of the long-term, large-scale effects of radiation, contamination, economic devastation and widespread social trauma, not to mention the immediate effects of a thermonuclear attack on a populous nation. A nuclear strike against a country is genocidal in its effects on that nation – involving millions of human beings in Iran and throughout the entire region with widespread global contamination.

Reported here.
__________________________________________________________________

Press Release

Ad Hoc Group Against Israeli Attack on Iran

More than 100 hundred Israeli academicians and peace activists have signed the following declaration:

There is no military, political or moral justification to initiate war with Iran

A constant flow of information bears witness to the fact that the Israeli government is seriously considering attacking Iran, in order to disrupt its nuclear plans. We do not disregard irresponsible actions by the Iranian government - we also oppose atomic weapons in principle and support the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction from the region. However, it is clear that the main source of the immediate danger of a new, widespread war stems from the policies of the Israeli government and the flow of threats from it, backed by provocative military maneuvers.

After serious consideration, we reiterate our position that all the arguments for such an attack are without any security, political or moral justification. Israel might get caught up in an act of adventurism that could endanger our very existence, and this without any serious effort to exhaust the political and diplomatic alternatives to armed conflict.

We are not certain that such an attack will occur. But the very fact that it is being weighed as a reasonable option, makes it imperative that we warn and caution against the destructive results of an offensive strike against Iran.

Coordinating Group:

Prof. Gadi Algazi; Judy Blanc; Prof. Rachel Giora; Prof. Anat Matar; Prof. Adi Ophir; Prof. Yoav Peled; Reuven Kaminer, Prof. Haggai Ram; Prof. Yehuda Shenhav; Prof. Oren Yiftachel

(contact: reuven.kaminer@gmail.com )

Read further.
Israel and the Palestinians - according to Benny Morris.
Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Benny Morris's Shocking Interview

The "Berlin Wall" and the "Israel Apartheid Wall"

President Obama Up Against the Middle East “Berlin Wall”
By Robert Weitzel

“People of the world -- look at Berlin, where a wall came down . . . and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one” -Barak Obama-

On July 24, Barak Obama stood where a 96-mile-long wall of barbed wire and concrete once separated the ideologies and lives of East and West Berlin. He told a crowd of 200,000 that “history reminds us that walls can be torn down” and that the “greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us one from another.”

He reminded the crowd that sixty years ago this summer, the Soviet Union “cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin. That [was] when . . . the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.”

American pilots nicknamed the rescue “Operation Vittles.” History knows it as the Berlin Airlift.

For the fifteen months of Operation Vittles, American C-47 and British Avro York cargo planes flew over the wall separating East and West Berlin 278,228 times, flying 92 million miles and delivering over 2,325,000 tons of food and vital supplies.

The Allies literally “flew to the sun” to save two million people.

The day before his Berlin speech, Obama stood at the 187-foot-long Western Wall that flanks the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. This wall is the closest anyone can get to the “Even ha-shetiya” (Foundation Stone), the holiest spot in Judaism and the biblical justification for the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

His presence at the wall so soon after his genuflection at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington D.C. in June assured the Israelis that their “security” would remain the number one priority of U.S. Middle East Policy.

As a C-47 flies, Obama was standing less than two miles from the 400-mile-long wall of concrete and fear and hate that divides a land and imprisons hope and makes a mockery of the democratic pretensions of Israel. On the Israeli side it is a landscaped separation barrier. On the Palestinian side it is a bleak apartheid wall. Neither barrier nor wall was mentioned by Obama . . .either day.

The walls surrounding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have turned these areas into open-air prisons. At the whim of the Israeli government or commanding officer or private soldier, entry/exit points are closed for hours, days, weeks or months.

Palestinians seeking life-saving medical attention are denied passage to hospitals on the landscaped side. Children are born just to die in the scorched dust while their mothers wait for permission to pass—mothers die as well. Workers are denied access to jobs, farmers to fields and students to school. A season’s worth of harvest rots in trucks broiling in the hot sun. Food, medical supplies, replacement parts for a deteriorating infrastructure and the stuff of daily commerce are permitted through in a trickle much too small to sustain the nearly four million people held beyond the reach of humanity’s conscience.

Fully eighty percent of people in Gaza live on less than two dollars a day and depend on food aid for their day-to-day survival. Many parents can provide only one meal a day for themselves and their children.

Dov Weisglas, a senior Israeli government advisor, was candid, if not boastful, regarding Israel’s unconscionable policy of cutting off food and supplies to the walled areas, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Anyone with an unblinkered view of the Zionist vision will understand Weisglas to mean, “The idea is to make their lives so intolerable that they lose hope and “choose” to go somewhere . . . anywhere . . . else.”

If ever there was a need for an airlift to breech a wall and succor a desperate people it is now. It is Palestine. Should Barak Obama become the next president of the world’s only superpower he will have an opportunity and the wherewithal to put his well-articulated Berlin vision into action. He will have an opportunity to walk his talk.

Forming a humanitarian “coalition of the willing,” President Obama can order American C-130 Hercules cargo planes, with a payload of 18 tons, to transport supplies the 360 miles from Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey to Israel. Sustaining the West Bank and Gaza Strip for fifteen months will require ferrying five million tons of food and supplies 93 million miles in 258,333 flights.

'Amaliet Ta'am (Operation Vittles), like the Berlin Airlift, will require a “trip to the sun.” But the “trip” will send a message to Israel that the world is standing as one to demand that they tear down the walls and create a legitimate secular democracy that guarantees the civil and human rights of all its inhabitants regardless of religion or ideology.

Barak Obama is not a disinterested or ill informed or uncaring man. He knows the reality of the Palestinians’ brutally suffocating existence. But he, like all national politicians in America, has had his knees weakened by the realpolitik of Israel’s shadow government on K Street.

Hopefully, if Obama is the man he claims to be, he will change the realpolitik in America and will one day walk with strengthened knees across the sands of a true democracy in Palestine-Israel or Israel-Palestine . . . or whatever they elect to call it.

Reported here.

The Fabricated Terrorist - The Case of Sami Al-Arian

Sami Al-Arian was a Florida university professor of computer science who was ensnared by the Bush Regime’s need to produce “terrorists” in order to keep Americans fearful and, thereby, amenable to the Bush Regime’s assault on US civil liberties.

The charges against Al-Arian were rejected by a jury, but the Bush Regime could not accept the obvious defeat. If Al-Arian was not a terrorist, then other of the Bush Regime’s fabricated cases might fall apart, too.

In open view, the US Department of Justice (sic) proceeded to trash every known ethical rule of prosecution. The Justice (sic) Department itself knows that it is persecuting a totally innocent person for reasons of a political agenda--the need to convince gullible Americans of an ongoing terrorist threat. The existence of this threat is used to justify the Bush Regime’s adoption of police state measures, such as spying on Americans without warrants, arresting them without charges, and refusing to let go of them when they are cleared by juries.

Sami Al-Arian is a fabricated terrorist created by federal prosecutors and judges in behalf of an undeclared agenda. The Al-Arian case proves that terrorists are in short supply and that the Bush Regime has had to create them out of total innocents. The “war on terror” is a hoax used to justify war crimes and the overthrow of America’s civil liberties.

Read further The Persecution of Sami Al-Arian, By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Free Sami Al-Arian Website is here.